


Matrem Cum Filis

by FelixCulpa19



Category: Christian Bible (New Testament), Christian Lore
Genre: Angst, Feminist Themes, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Rules the world, The hand that rocks the cradle, The price of redemption
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-08
Updated: 2015-10-08
Packaged: 2018-04-25 10:27:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4956772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FelixCulpa19/pseuds/FelixCulpa19
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>~ Mother and Child ~<br/>Jesus' last day with his mother, and Mary's part in the divine drama.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Matrem Cum Filis

The door swings open soundlessly and a cool undercurrent of air seeps into the room. The house smells of warm bread and pots of honey left open, tidy piles of clothing and linen where guests might have been seated.

A soft voice he recognises immediately is singing in the back room. The tune rises and falls like the desert dunes, a song of faith and life and waiting with surety.

If it were any other day, he’d go straight to the sounds of activity, put his arms around his mother and say something that would make her laugh before taking his hand and shepherding him to the kitchen. But today time seems to be mocking him, racing forward relentlessly, and he doesn’t know what to do, what to say. Instead he seats himself on a pile of blankets that smell of summer and waits, closing his eyes and listening.

The song halts at the last verse. “Son?” he hears, and he looks up at his mother, guiltily.

“Ma.”

He knows and wonders how he must look to her – hands fisted in his lap, face pale, breathing unevenly paced. His mother’s forehead creases into knots of worry as she scans him, maternally noting every different detail, before smoothing into understanding. She places the basket on the floor and joins her son on the bench.

“I’m here,” she tells him, and suddenly he’s six again, bringing home a scraped elbow. The memory brings a jolt to his queasy stomach and he suddenly wants to cry.

Mary takes his hand in hers; “Why’s my little Jesus upset?”

“I’m fine, Ma.” His shoulders are hunched. There are deep shadows under the creases of Jesus’ eyes. “I’m just tired.”

Sighing, she pulls her son to her chest, resting her chin on his bowed head. He’s shaking. “I’m here, I’ve always been here, talk to me,” Mary repeats, and feels Jesus begin to relax ever so slightly as he allowed himself to be comforted.  For all his life it’s been his mother that filled the gaps in his psyche, for divinity was hard to assimilate with the juxtapositions and metamorphoses of humanity.

After a long silence, the inner turmoil too great to suppress any longer, he explains, deflated: “Tomorrow’s the Pasch, Ma.”

“I’ve just made you new clothes to wear for it.”

“And I’ll be gone for the evening.”

“I’ll still be in the city, I won’t be far.”

He pauses, presses a finger to his eyes. “I won’t be coming back… here.”

A sigh flits over her features. “I know.”

She’s known ever since he was born, seen his last moments on Calvary ever since the old Simeon prophesied about swords piercing her heart; watched him fight visions of it in his dreams. She’s known this day was going to come and dreaded it for thirty long years. But Mary, she who the angel had visited, has crystallised somewhere down the timeline of her divine son’s life, she does not shatter under the weight of destiny.

Jesus – her son, her boy, her God, afraid, calling her and wanting what she cannot give – closes his eyes, hiding tears. “I don’t know what I’m feeling,” he tries to explain. It’s all wrong; he’s never felt so hesitant to leave home, senses amplified yet the future cloudy with the lure of alternative paths and contrary choices where his destiny had been a clear path before. “I didn’t imagine it to be like this. I don’t understand.” He looks up at his mother, pleading. “It’s like I’m standing at the edge of the world and suddenly about to fall.”

Mary tucks a stray strand of hair behind his ear, heart aching as her son leans into the touch. How lonely he must have been, to speak so often of his oncoming passion yet know his followers barely expected it to truly happen.

He waits for her answer, so sure that she will know the right words to say.

“And I’m right there holding your hand. Don’t worry,” Mary answers, and smiles.

He didn’t think he could ever feel unsure. Or scared. Under the stars on his journeys as a preacher, he would imagine what he would say on his last visit home, picture himself holding his mother as she cried, walking with certainty down the streets that he would later be led, captured, throughout. He had never imagined fear. He had never imagined the dizzying terror of losing secure footing.

“What if I fail?” Mary hears him whisper as a tear traces his jawline.

His mother gives him a look that says the idea never once crossed her mind. “You won’t,” she tells him flatly, with divine authority that makes Hell shudder. “I know you will.”

He expels air, eyes searching hers like a sailor to the shore. “Truly, Ma?” Against her chest he can hear her heart beating, blood pulsing. “Truly?”

“With all my heart,” she replies, and He wonders how He could have created someone so believing, a faith so unfaltering, so perfect in a world of imperfections. She is so beautiful his eyes hurt – her clothes are plain, hands bearing the marks of domestic servitude but beauty was never measured by what the eye showed to him and his mother is beautiful in a way that only the angels can describe – and in his mind the clouds are dissipating.

* * *

 

Later on, in his last night before his passion, he sleeps in his old room. The shadows of furniture he made a long time ago that Mary had been adamant to take with her when they left Nazareth stand like sentries around him, silent friends surrounding him while the choice of desertion knocks at his subconscious.

The door creaks open. It’s Mary, with a blanket and for some strange reason he feigns sleep like he’s eight years old again and furtively staying up late to read.

“Bedtime, Jesus,” Mary gently admonishes, an undercurrent of laughter in her voice.

He wants this, he wants to go back to being a child, to ignoring the future and relishing the present. He wants to stay in this cocoon of familiarity, behind mother’s skirts where there was only ever safety and daydreams that spoke of sunlight and saving the world in ways that were not tinged with the scent of metal and jeering mockery.

Mary watches her son sadly, knowing the unspoken thoughts in his head the way only a mother can. She’s known him from the very beginning, watched him grow into a boy who stayed apart and quiet with the pervading aura of purposefully shrouded genius, into a man who watched people’s hearts and read their pasts and futures before they even acknowledged his presence; a man who’d be close to breaking under discouragement because human hearts were so hard to change, who’d walk miles in the rain in the dark just to come home and fall into her arms where he could unburden his woes and fears to her.

She’s the only one he’s ever felt safe enough to show a side that wasn’t radiating with strength and power.

The night aches with longing; the darkness deepening with foreboding farewells. They both know it’s their last night together, like this, just the two of them and the world shut away outside.

Mary places the blanket over the one he’s already under, humming softly to him as she does so.   
“I love you,” she says. She plants a kiss on his hair – will she ever have the chance to do that again? - before moving to leave.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers shakily, which halts her. He cannot, he will not, sleep. “You’ve always held me up and never asked me to do the same for you, but I know, Ma.” He thinks of the pain of simply watching, of being left behind, of no one noticing, and takes a shuddering breath. “I know,” he repeats, and he aches. 

His mother stays silent. If she spoke, she would weep.

The night deepens. “How could I ever thank you for everything?” he asks her, sitting up in bed to look at her.

She draws closer to the shaft of descending moonlight, laces his fingers in hers.

“Win this battle,” Mary whispers, and his heart is set.

 

* * *

 

She could tell him to stay, and he would. She could forbid him to walk out of the door to his death and he would be all too glad to comply, to obey his mother, the woman who alone bore traces of the paradise he had left behind. He is tense like a pulled arrow, hesitant to move any further.

“Shall I go, Mother?” He asks finally, the words coming out as shaky breaths. Shall I leave, shall I die, will you not come with me? It is a question that leaches sunlight from the air - if she says no, maybe he might feel safe enough to breathe; if she says yes, oblivion. Salvation teeters on an edge of a knife, waiting once again the way it did thirty three years ago at the arrival of an angel, waiting for her answer.

Mary’s voice is gentle and sad. “Don’t let me hold you back,” she says, and she hopes he cannot hear her heart breaking.

The sun has already chased the shadows away, the city shaking off the last dregs of sleep. But before he can go, he must turn - he looks and looks and burns the image to his memory; if there’s anything he wants to remember it is this, the sight of his mother watching him, surrounded by home and childhood memories of a simpler time, his mother giving him a smile that shouts of pride, of acceptance, of belief that he will do the impossible.

“Goodbye, Ma.” He’s still so small in her eyes, so fragile. Her pride in him is imbued with sorrow. “And thank you for everything.”

“I’m right here with you,” she says - calls, shouts. And then, “I love you.”

She doesn’t say goodbye.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This has no scriptural grounding at all, but merely an author's imagination of the last meeting of Mother and Son. I like to think that Jesus in His humanity felt doubt and uncertainty, and that his Mother was the one who gave Him the support that the world did not.


End file.
